Jagged Heartline

• Samantha Walls, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2014

His home was shattered by the pain and anguish of other men.

Lines in the sand were drawn around moments of pain – the child's swollen belly and the flies that crawled at the corners of his eyes, the skeletal limbs: would it make it easier to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? And if it did, was it a disservice to his sister, who lay in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And did that make them more important than a thousand other children touched by the same famine?

He had thought he'd already reached his capacity for pain and had no room inside him for more. But he remembered his mother’s words from a dream of distant memory: that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now he understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upwards, and, just when you'd thought you'd reached your limit, you would begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain.

Some people had too much power and too much cruelty to live. Some people were too horrible, no matter if you loved them; no matter that you had to make yourself terrible too, in order to stop them. Some things just had to be done.

He had so many thoughts, so many beliefs, that contradicted one another, and he couldn’t make sense of what was right and what was wrong and what meant anything anymore.

But now he wondered – what if everyone was the same and it was just a thousand small choices that added up to the person someone became? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or brilliant Spirits whispering the right answers in the ears of the mortals like it was some cosmic school exam. Just them, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day, making the best choices they could.

The thought was horrifying, terrifying. If that was true, then there was no right choice. There was only choice.

He felt it in his bones, creeping along his skin, a delirium of fierce satisfaction and blinding righteousness that came when his eyes met hers. It was the electric feel of her hand against his scarred cheek, her tears against his lips, and the knowledge that they now had a chance.

He had made the right choice out of thousands of smaller wrong choices, and now she would complete him like no one else in the world would ever be able to.

Someone had once told him that nameless things changed constantly – that names fixed them in place like pins. But without a name, a thing wasn't quite real either. So when he finally whispered the words to her, giving name to the thing inside him that had grown and grown and grown the longer she had looked at him – smiled, laughed, cried, hated, fought, helped – and stayed with him.